Pavarotti backstage with Princess Diana after a very rainy concert in Hyde Park, July 1991. Diana put away her umbrella after being informed it disrupted the view of some other members of the audience. Photograph: Tim Graham/Getty Images

Did you notice? When Pavarotti died this week something very unusual happened. The death of an artist - no. It was that the death of a classical practitioner of an elite art form led many news bulletins here in Britain, and no doubt around much of the world.

All right, Pavarotti was a special case, someone who transcended the rigid categories which divide music. He sold more albums, so I read today, than anyone except Madonna and Elton John.

But the ability to command the news headlines is unusual. When was the last time it happened in this way? When Lawrence Olivier died in 1989? Film stars, like pop stars, are slightly different because theirs are popular mediums and their fame is both greater and more ephemeral.

Even then it's rare. Valentino's demise was front page news because they'd never been anyone like him in the short history of cinema. So was Chaplin's because there has been no one like him since. Elvis' because he was a king, albeit one who'd more or less abdicated.

John Lennon, obviously, not only because of who he was, but the fact that he was shockingly murdered on a New York street. The death of Marilyn Monroe in August 1962 - how I remember that - still haunts the collective imagination: premature, lonely, suspicious...

But who else? Certainly Picasso's death in 1973 led the bulletins. I remember a Guardian editorial suggesting that the last such artist to die so famous was Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema, the Dutch-born neo-classical painter of antiquity (1836-1912), though I am not sure if the comparison was appropriate. His fame faded as fast as the revolutionary Picasso's will not.

How they died usually helps and whether or not they were young, unfulfilled or plain unhappy. Everyone knew that the divine Maria Callas had been abandoned by Aristotle Onassis for Jackie Kennedy, even those who didn't know or care that she was a great artist. Cue for joke: Who was it who said, on being asked, what would have happened if the Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, had been shot instead of JFK: "I do not think Onassis would have married Mrs Khruschev"?

Unless I am mistaken, Callas died the same day in 1977 that the rocker Marc Bolan got killed in a car crash. Certainly, The Sun rose to the occasion and split its front page to unite in death two artists with no previous record of collaboration. It was probably Callas the paper thought it was being generous towards.

The death of Charles Dickens would have led the BBC Six o'Clock News in 1870 and the Sun too, if they'd known the exact (covered-up) circumstances of a tryst away from home. Tolstoy too, "the greatest novelist since Cervantes," the Wiki tells us. There's grainy film footage of his last runaway stand on that railway station 1910.

Which novelists or playwrights since? Which composers or conductors? Which poets or painters? Which pianists or other virtuosi? On a Friday afternoon I'm stumped. Perhaps there really is something about a wonderful voice, not perfect as the experts rush to tell us, that reaches parts of wider humanity better than anything else. My wife's family has a nice story about their grandmother, ill-educated and dispatched to New Zealand in her teens. Yet somewhere in her adventurous life, so they told each other, grandma had actually heard the great Enrico Caruso sing.